social semiotics

The article contains a characterization of some sociosemiotic rules that regulate the choice and arrangement of language units in the process of speech generation. Arguments are offered in favour of the view that the rules should be included into the generative model of an utterance. A dependency is ascertained between the constituent parts of a communicative register (a category closely related to that of speech genre) and the word selection rules of speech generation. The sociosemiotic rules of choosing a name for the agent serve as an example.

The article supports the thesis about the relevant socio-­semiotic positioning of T­-shirt-­legends in the system of modern mass communication and the con­sequently resulting legitimacy of their investigation as a specific class of research objects of language theory and discourse analysis. The author argues that texts under examination are marked in two ways as manifestations of genre and functional consistency in socio­-communicative practices.